


singing with skin and bone

by restlesslikeme



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Familial Abuse, M/M, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-15
Updated: 2012-06-15
Packaged: 2017-11-07 20:15:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,788
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/434994
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/restlesslikeme/pseuds/restlesslikeme
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>And here is what they’d call the defining moment, the turn of events- though when he gets older, Bruce will start to think that the violence started much earlier than this.</p>
            </blockquote>





	singing with skin and bone

**Author's Note:**

> Trigger warnings, in case you missed them in the tags: child and spouse abuse ending in death, attempted suicide, misc violence.

She has a strong jaw and cheekbones, but a soft nose. Her eyes are a sort of hazel color, her hair dark and thick like his. Bruce can remember all of these things individually, in pieces, though he can’t put them together to form a face. Her lips are what he’d think raspberries should be colored like, had he ever eaten raspberries back then.

Love pours out of her like a soft, clear yellow and there are bruises under her eyes and along her back.

Their house is decorated in greens. There’ve always been greens. 

Bruce gets up-close views of things other people look over; the little buttons that line the bottom of the couch are pale lime and shiny, its fabric stitched of thick wool. The carpet is rough and serrated at the corners, and it digs into his knees while he crouches behind the sofa to avoid whiskey breath and shaking hands that come to blows. Bruce counts the buttons as best he remembers how; if he stares at them long enough they begin to swim in front of his eyes.

His father doesn’t have a face, just shadows and hands. Sweaty collarbones. They’re scientist’s hands, or they were, but they tremble and break now, with nails that are flaky. The kind of hands that inspire fear. He is only allowed to keep his family’s home on the base because of someone else’s blind faith in his once sparkling, now rotting genius. 

Later Bruce will say that he doesn’t remember any of it. Doesn’t remember the words _monster, abomination, freak_ , doesn’t remember bruises or blood or shouts, doesn’t remember that his mother’s perfume smelled like lilacs while she held him on the corner of the floor behind the bed.

 

-

 

“Nobody knows gamma radiation like you.”

Natasha Romanoff’s hair is red like fire or blood. He thinks that’s what she must look like on the inside too, though he’s heard otherwise. She is cool and professional on the outside and Bruce is getting tired of cool and professional, he’s been tired of it for a long, long time. Impersonal. Cool and professional and impersonal are the things they dig into your gut and twist until you choke and bleed.

“No one is going to put you in a cage.”

He screams at her because he wants to see her react. Because he wants to see the terror in her eyes. Because he wants to hear the gunmen that he knows are outside snap to attention. Because maybe he really does hope that she’ll shoot. He screams at her because he wants to, and he watches her start to crumble.

“I’m sorry,” says Bruce, and his smile is sympathetic with her gun pointed at his face. “That was mean.”

He feels nothing for these people and he’s never been one of them.

He goes because this, like everything else in his life, was already out of his hands in the minute he stepped through the door.

 

-

 

He meets Betty Ross when he’s twenty, during his first day at the desert defense base in New Mexico. She smiles at him and the top row of her teeth peeks out from behind her lips and although her brown hair is tied back sleekly, her bangs frame her pale, freckled face. Her eyes are hazel, and he wants her immediately.

Bruce kisses Betty in the darkened corridor of the lab one night, her face tipped up to his, her eyelashes brushing his cheeks. 

“You kiss like you’re walking on glass,” she tells him, and Bruce doesn’t know how to answer, so he simply leans in again and hopes this is something that he can keep.

 

-

 

His father’s hands are too big, disproportionate. Too dark and rough. They grab his neck and push, Bruce’s body too small to do anything but fall and he hears the gun or the bottle or whatever is in his father’s hands this time clatter against the wood of the side table.

His mother’s hands are gentler and soft, and they hold ice to the bruises after his father’s disappeared. Her fingernails are clean and rounded over, soft white like the pictures of the crescent moon in some of his books. She kisses his hair.

Bruce is under the table when it happens; he hears the words again and stays quiet, curled in on himself. His mother is making dinner. 

He hears her ask something, and the bowl of salad she’d been making crashes down at her feet, spreading everywhere. She’s thrown to the floor, then, struggling, and he follows her down, and after that there isn’t much that he can remember. In Bruce’s mind the world is all red and thick, spilling over and through her dark hair and he should remember her screaming but he doesn’t. He doesn’t remember anything but the noises his father makes after she stops moving, like an animal or a monster or a wild thing being ripped open. They’re heaving, shuddering, howling sounds. There’s blood on his shirt and the tiles and her forehead and lips and it’s creeping over the bright white toes of Bruce’s new shoes.

When he thinks that the animal on the floor holding his mother won’t touch him, he crawls to the safety of the cupboard and locks himself into the dark. The black manifests behind his eyelids, down his throat, and in his chest.

It doesn’t leave.

 

-

 

The technology he’s given to work with is beyond anything he’s ever seen before, even at university. He’s not treated with respect, but there’s a little more awe and distrust from the grunts that is a testament, he thinks, to his alleged genius. He’s young and alone even when Betty is with him and there’s something inside him still searching and scrabbling desperately for some kind of personal humanity and it’s for all of these reasons and none of them that Bruce Banner designs a bomb for the U.S. military.

The gamma bomb should do twice the amount of damage as the A bomb dropped on Hiroshima. It’s a secret operation, one which very few people qualify for and even fewer people are smart enough to understand the mechanics of. It’s a bomb that will win a war and wipe out nations- and this isn’t how Bruce sees it at all.

Bruce sees equations and matter, he sees the tools he’s being allowed to touch and he sees creation, science, happening in front of his eyes. He’s not, after all, in any position of authority. He is a scientist and science, he tells himself, can’t be good or evil. 

He tells himself these things because he’s logical enough to understand that they’re moral, that he should need to feel vindicated. In reality, he finds himself withdrawn. He watches Betty through a pane of glass, like a slide on a microscope, and everything else not at all.

 

-

 

And here is what they’d call the defining moment, the turn of events, though when he gets older, Bruce will start to think that the violence started much earlier than this.

Here is Bruce Banner’s greatest invention being tested- a weapon with the potential for genocide, and the redblack that pulses perpetually behind his eyelids fading enough that when they tell him a civilian is on the grounds, he runs. He runs faster than he ever has for anything in the name of saving a single human life, despite the fact that he’s been designing against millions all this time.

The dust spits up around his feet and he manages to grab a fistful of shirt, to shove the boy into the trenches just as his ears start to ring. 

Here is Bruce Banner, molecular scientist and top of the field physicist in gamma radiation engulfed in the flame and light that he created. It feels like being taken apart, like his atoms are being split open in bursts of blinding yellow and different shades of green and he screams and howls like the memory of an animal that’s been prowling through his nightmares for as long as he can remember.

He thinks of lime colored couch buttons and the edges of bruises and a hand around his throat and feels everything push out of his skin, tear him up from the inside out. 

And then he’s back in the cupboard in the dark again.

 

-

 

Captain America is exactly as Bruce would have pictured him: chemically tall and well built, self-righteous in a somehow mild and inoffensive way with a rehearsed line meant to keep Bruce’s respect. Any interest Bruce may have had in him fades away after that. 

Everyone else is the same: people in suits following commands, speaking in solid voices. It’s like being at a military encampment all over again, but with more women and the details on their uniforms are blue spandex instead of green and beige. Bruce stays as small as possible and they still all walk around him like he’s something huge, ready to snap at any moment. He snarks at them through his discomfort.

Tony Stark is the only one besides himself and Captain Rogers who isn’t in a uniform, and the first thing he does is stride into the room and start talking like he runs the place. When he starts spouting questions and theory about the tesseract and the science surrounding it, Bruce can’t help that he jumps in. It’s been a long time since he’s felt in step with a conversation. 

Tony turns around and looks Bruce dead in the eye like he’s seeing an equation for the first time. “Your work on anti-electron collisions is unparalleled”, he says, and then, “And I’m a huge fan of the way you lose control and turn into a giant green rage monster.”

 _This is my life summed up in two sentences,_ Bruce thinks.

But Tony mentioned his work first. It somehow seems significant.

 

-

 

He can never really remember anything afterwards but blurs of color and noise, pain sometimes if he had been shot at. He wakes up exhausted, sweating and bruised and vomits until he thinks he’s going to cough up his organs.

“You killed three people,” Betty tells him, her voice a whisper, her hazel eyes terrified. “They have to rebuild the whole bunker.”

This time it’s she who kisses his forehead like she’s walking on glass.

 

-

 

The gun is smooth, soft black. It doesn’t line up properly the way it should with the drawer in which it sits (right angle, the top of the barrel parallel to the side of the drawer), and even this young, the disorder bothers Bruce, makes him uneasy. If it were untouched the drawer would be orderly.

It’s heavy when he lifts it and for one heart-stopping moment he nearly fumbles it onto the floor. He can imagine the clatter it would make, can imagine footsteps thudding down the hallway, the door slamming open, the walls of the room closing in and-

But he’s alone. Just a little boy with his father’s gun once again, and he runs his fingers over it carefully while his heart thuds in his chest.

“Bruce,” his mother calls from the kitchen, and he freezes immediately. “Bruce, come have lunch.”

He lines the gun up straight when he replaces it back in the drawer.

 

-

 

Betty is too breakable to look at; Bruce keeps his eyes closed when he fucks her, his hands on the bed at her sides rather than anywhere on her body. She gasps soft and fast against his ear, her breath clean and sweet, and grips at his back with surprising strength.

“I love you,” she whispers. “I love you.”

Bruce buries his face into her hair and pretends not to hear her, tries not to think of hands tinged green; of peeling fingernails, or bird bones and the ease with which they can be crushed. Of death.

 

-

 

Sometimes when Bruce is in the lab trying to trace the gamma radiation and Tony is there with him and everyone else is doing whatever they do, he’ll catch Tony staring at him. It’s not something that Tony is subtle about- the look on his face is one of unbridled scientific curiosity, and Bruce understands. Were their positions reversed, he’d probably be doing the same thing. 

Bruce has been dealing with this for too long; it’s not that Tony stares that offsets him. He’s too used to that.

It’s the way he looks at Bruce straight on when he gets caught. Like they share something. Like he wants something.

Bruce doesn’t know anything about that.

Tony is the chaos of Calcutta, of New Delhi, of the slums of Mumbai all wrapped up into one person. His mania comes off of him in waves and after so long in the middle of the disorder, he makes sliding into settlement far too easy for Bruce. There’s an air underneath all of it that feels tense and tired and ready to snap all at once, an electrical storm or a drowning, maybe. A sensation Bruce is all too familiar with. 

 

-

 

At the facility in Phoenix they put him behind fortified plexiglass. Bruce sits in the middle of the floor with a heavy iron collar around his neck, his wrists bound behind his back and he closes his eyes against the flashing, bleeping lab lights. The metal bites into his skin and drags his spine down painfully, and the stagnant air is making him sweat. Bruce breathes. He meditates. 

He holds out against four days of physical and psychological torture before he breaks.

Six days after they first dragged him into that lab, he wakes up in the middle of desert, naked and covered in blood that isn’t his. He can remember flashes: white biohazard suits; sparks and flames from electrical surges, red and bright; everything hazed greenish, screams and crushed bone and gunfire.

 

-

 

He goes up into the mountains to do it, somewhere he can’t hurt anyone if things go wrong. Somewhere they won’t find him if they go right. 

There isn’t a way out, he knows that now. No matter how much he focuses or monitors his heart rate, no matter how long he spends trying to develop a cure, the monster is always going to be right there pushing at his skull, humming behind his teeth. Waiting, waiting, waiting.

Monster. Abomination. Freak.

People are just going to keep dying.

The gun he has isn’t even his, he took it from the remains of the last complex they he woke up in and has been carrying it with him ever since. He doesn’t like guns and so he never learned how to use one. He barely knows what to do with it. It’s probably this that keeps him from any final vanities of picking out his own, something nicer, to end it all with. It’s not going to matter.

It’s cold and heavy when he unwraps it from his backpack, and he traces his fingers over the barrel, has the fleeting thought that this has happened before. Maybe it has. Maybe he’s already dead, and this is Hell. If he dies again, will he just be reborn in the same place, repeating this nightmare over and over? Best not to think about it.

It tastes metallic when he puts it past his lips. He’s surprised to find that his hands aren’t shaking.

Easy, then.

Just a pull of the trigger-

 

-

 

Bruce opens his eyes after New York expecting to see rubble and fire.

Instead there’s Tony with the sun behind him and sirens screaming all around. His helmet is off, blackened and burned, and Bruce has the sense that he’s come back from the dead, resurrected again. 

Bruce pushes himself up and Tony sits himself down, passing Bruce a wool blanket to cover himself with.

“Do you remember?” Tony asks, squinting up at the sky.

Bruce looks up too. He remembers, then. Tony like a falling star; shining red, brilliant and divine. Dropping without struggle as if he were asleep, peaceful but for the imminent crash.

“Yes.” Bruce says quietly.

Tony smiles.

 

-

 

He finds his center of balance in India, amid chaos that he can’t control, a language he cannot speak, poverty and desolation he cannot cure. The kids who find him here have eyes only slightly darker than the circles under his and- slowly, carefully, always with focus- he treats their ills and mends their broken bones.

This place is all shades of red, yellow, orange, and when he isn’t working Bruce allows himself to soak some of it in. His skin is brown by now.

He goes from city to city, living in worn down apartments and rooms, staying a while and then moving on when he feels restless or paranoid. His clothes get dirty and then don’t get clean again. 

Bruce breathes. He fixes. He keeps his head down. He does good. He stays angry.

He hasn’t had an episode in nearly a year.

Sometimes in the houses he visits there are televisions playing mangled, Hindi versions of American current events. This is the only contact he has with the country that used to be his home and exists only in these flashes. Rumors of super soldiers, someone they’re calling the smartest billionaire in the world, unexplained electrical storms.

Bruce looks away and continues on with his work.

 

-

 

The last time he sees Betty Ross she’s on the other side of a glass door as he’s being pulled away (again, again, again) to be loaded into a truck. She surges forward once, her lips parted to scream something that he can’t hear, then someone in a white coat is pulling her back, trying to turn her around, and Bruce closes his eyes.

 

-

 

At night sometimes when he feels like he’s slipping, when the good parts of the world start to worm their way under his skin, Bruce takes the gun out of his pack and he holds onto it. 

When he can feel the anger (of being hurt, of hurting, of being cheated out of an end, of everything because what _isn’t_ there to be angry about, when it comes down to it?) buzzing around his temples again, he can put it away. 

 

-

 

Tony kisses the same way he does everything else: too fast and hard and a little bit desperate; like he’s playing with chemicals that can and should blow up in his face at any second. He fists a hand in Bruce’s hair and pushes into his space, backs him up against the table until Bruce has nowhere to go. Bruce can feel his pulse beating in his ears and he turns his face away, breaking it.

“What are you doing,” he rasps, breathless. Tony’s eyes are too dark. “You can’t, I’ll-”

“No you won’t.” Tony answers, his mouth twisting up into a grin, his teeth amazingly white considering how much whiskey and coffee Bruce has seen him consume, the cigarettes he keeps around. “Trust me, Doc.” he pushes down hard on Bruce’s hipbone, pinning him.

Bruce takes a deep breath, trying not to choke, trying to center himself.

“Tell me to stop.” Tony says, and stares at him straight on again. 

Bruce reaches forward with both hands and pulls him down into another kiss.

 

-

 

He spends most of his time in the lab, working on various things while Tony shoots him questions, talks rapidly at him in jargon they both understand, laughs loudly in a way that bounces off the walls and makes Bruce smile. He thinks about JARVIS, and the Tony Stark he read about who designed an AI at the age of fifteen and he understands.

“I saw you on TV once,” he tells Tony one day, his eyes on the workstation in front of him, using his fingers to drag pieces of a formula together. “They were calling you a genius.”

“Lots of people have called me a genius, probably because I am,” Tony quips back, his motormouth moving while his hands are busy. “Lots of people have seen me on TV too, it’s one of those things when you’re a world famous billionaire, you know, TV, radio sometimes even though it’s grossly outdated, magazines, I can’t help that everyone wants a piece of me, I know, my life is hard, Doc. How did I look?”

Bruce smiles briefly, fondly, then says, "Tired.” he pauses. “Separate. And I thought ‘Fuck, I know the feeling’.”

Tony shuts up for a second, then.

“This fell off the suit when I was fixing it,” he says finally, tossing something Bruce’s way. He catches it. 

“Thought you might want to scan it for whatever. Get the stats on the interdimensional environmental damage shit.”

It’s a scrap of metal, the paint mostly blackened and the edges gnarled up, small enough to fit in the palm of Bruce’s hand. The middle of it is still bright red, though, and there’s a hole punched through the top like a chain might go through. He runs his thumb over it.

“Thanks.” he says, and tucks it into his shirt pocket. From the corner of his eye, he sees Tony smiling.

 

-

 

Bruce closes his fingers around the reactor in Tony’s chest and feels it buzz through his palm, the light of it casting a blue glow through his flesh and he thinks he can feel this right up into his bones.

Tony hooks a hand under his knee and pulls him forward, pushes in close, breathes roughly against Bruce’s ear while Bruce trips over words.

“Fuck, _Tony_.”

Tony has a hand in in his hair and grips tight, pulling his head back so that he can mouth over Bruce’s collarbone, biting down just enough that it’ll bruise, and Bruce’s hips buck up hard enough that Tony’s rhythm nearly stutters.

“Come on,” Tony mutters into his skin. “Come on, come _on_. Shit, Bruce.” he rolls his hips forward again and reaches down to work his hand over Bruce’s cock, his grip just tight enough, his mouth trailing now over pulse points.

“Tony,” he pushes his heel into Tony’s lower back, trying to get him closer, closer, and then Tony is fucking into him harder, faster and twisting his hand just right on the upstroke and Bruce is arching up and choking off a curse, his hand still anchoring him to a star.

 

-

(There will always be greens, then, but the edges of bruises don’t look so bad when they come from Tony’s mouth, and red can be metal shininsunlight, rather than blood. There’s the hazel eyes of women loved, of kids no longer sick and dying. There’s blue, and yellow, and words or silences to fill up the dark spaces in between. And maybe all of this is something Bruce can have).

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Je pourrais rester ici pour toujours](https://archiveofourown.org/works/554253) by [barelyjoyous](https://archiveofourown.org/users/barelyjoyous/pseuds/barelyjoyous)




End file.
